Hey everybody! Jeremy’s back…

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…and as usual the MOOC discussion is intense and extremely informative. If you want to join in go here and/or here.

And while I have your attention, let me just state as publicly as possible how much I appreciate his participation on this blog. I can only imagine what it must be like to turn on your computer one day and find out that someone is critiquing many of the decisions you make in your entire course in great detail. Jeremy has weathered it in good humor and with an earnest desire to be a batter teacher. For that, we should all thank him whether we’re taking his MOOC or not.

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I wanted to say that I’ve been very interested in this conversation, and thank you for having it. I found your question about money really important. Why should knowledge workers be expected to donate our time? And if we do donate it, how are we to eat, buy clothing, shelter, etc?

When I read about MOOCs, it sounds like there’s a sense that someone will “can” these lectures, make them available in new “courses” in whatever way, and then it’s done. We’ll have, it’s imagined, history in a can, for all time. But within five or ten years, surely there will be other things that need to be said, or other ways to talk about what happened? Will some other superprofessor be asked to donate time to add supplementary lectures? Or to redo the whole? It sort of seems like the academic books in the library from the 1950s: sure, there’s some interesting stuff there, and good, solid work. But we also need the more recent work, and we need people to keep working.

Hi Jonathan and everyone — a couple of NYT articles this morning should interest us all. The first is the Florida deliberations on whether to charge differential tuitions on different courses/majors. History and philosophy courses would cost more, while STEM courses would cost students less — even though the costs of putting on the courses are in inverse proportion to the fees. This is one of the reasons why I think humanists need to come up with a forward-looking model or we will be scaled back anyway.

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"Rees has written a solid, comprehensive account of the technological creation of cold chains in the United States. I wish this book had been available for me to read when I was doing my own research."—Mansel G. Blackford, Ohio State University.